rabbi ari lev: Journey to the Well of Jewish Time
Erev Rosh Hoshannah 5777
October 2, 2016
There was a time when I thought I might be done with Judaism and commit my life to Buddhist meditation.
For anyone who has ever sat a silent meditation retreat, not much happens activity wise. The schedule of the day is an uninteresting combination of sitting meditation and walking meditation - maybe a few minutes to speak with a teacher in a formal interview. Sleeping and eating punctuate an otherwise uneventful day. And yet, so much arises. The experience can be extreme - extremely joyful, extremely painful - both physically and mentally. A week can go by and nothing happens and everything happens, all at once.
The wisdom of removing all external stimulus gives us the opportunity to see clearly what of our lives is simply and purely, us.
To see ourselves more clearly. It can’t be blamed on bureaucracy or traffic. It is some combination of genetics and experience, integrated into our bones and our brains.
In the words of Rabbi Alan Lew, alav hashalom, “In the visible world, we live out our routine and sometimes messy lives. We have jobs, families, and houses. Our lives seem quite ordinary. It is only beneath the surface of this world that the real and unseen drama of our lives is unfolding…” [1] Meditation is what taught me how to pay attention to that which was beneath the surface, to journey inward.
But at some point, on some retreat, I had a moment of wakefulness, and I thought to myself, What about Shabbat?! If I became a monk, I would really miss Shabbat. And Passover. And quite frankly Yom Kippur!
I realized that the journey through the Jewish year is its own retreat, its own journey inward. Each holiday is a tincture, a salve, a well of wisdom from which to draw. It is a container for our emotions as it calls forth different parts of ourselves. Each month, with its own character, is like a bookmark on the heart, it assures us there will be space for joy and there will be time to weep.
Fear not, all of who you are can be found here, in the rhythm of Jewish time.
And, perhaps most importantly, you are not alone. We will journey together, we will take each other there.
I believe that cycle of the Jewish year is full of medicine for the ailments of being human. And each holiday brings with it a booster shot for a different spiritual practice.
The Jewish holidays are constants against which we measure time and change. Each holiday brings its own stories, emotions and rituals.
For example, Sukkot connects us to the physical world, the cycle of rain and draught, to a culture of hospitality and the bounty of the harvest. Hanukkah is about light and miracles, hope and natural resources. Purim forces us to question reality, to redefine bravery and to embody joy. On Passover we imbibe freedom, we steep ourselves in ritual and crawl out of the dark days of winter and into the possibility of spring, of redemption, of liberation. Tisha B’av is a moment of collective mourning, of sitting with loss and destruction, of outrage and release. This is but a taste of the well of Jewish time that we are called to gather around and draw from. It is where we, like our ancestors, might meet our lovers, our partners, our comrades. It replenishes our burnout, quenches our loneliness, oxygenates our souls.
And we drink from that well tonight.
Rosh Hashanah means head of the year. It marks the start of the Jewish calendar as we know it. But as it turns out, Rosh Hashanah, as we know it, is never mentioned in the Torah.
Rabbi Alan Lew explains, “In ancient Israel the seventh month of the year was an anxious time. All the other civilizations of the ancient Near East were sustained by great rivers. The Egyptians had the Nile, the Babylonians had the Tigris and the Euphrates; but Israel was completely dependent on rain. The rains came in the eighth month. So the seventh month was a time when the nation of Israel felt its life hanging in the balance. This utter dependence on the heavens seems to have given the ancient Israelites an intense sense of their dependence on God. It may very well have been this dependence that sensitized the Israelites to the existence of God in the first place. They felt themselves to be part of a vast interpenetrating whole, a cosmos in which the weather and their own moral condition were active and interdependent constituents. The round of holidays we now call the Days of Awe gave form to this sense.” [2]
What we now call Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish “new year” is only mentioned in the Torah as Yom HaZikaron - a day of remembrance, and Yom Zikaron Truah, the day the great horn of remembrance is sounded, observed 10 days before Yom Kippur.
But what were we meant to remember?
And why this great sound?
As if to awaken us from our slumber, like the existential alarm clock, calling us back to ourselves, our purpose. Sure, it is an opportunity to renew your membership, donate to just causes, and reconnect to community after the irregularity of summer,
but what is the real tonic of Rosh Hashanah?
Tonight I want to explore three deep truths about Rosh Hashanah.
First, Rosh Hashanah is our reset button. a new beginning. In the age of snapchat and instagram, where emails arrive every second by the dozen, pausing is a sacred act.
The first step in interrupting a destructive or addictive behavior is becoming aware. Rosh Hashanah presents us at the very least with that long pause that makes awareness possible.
It is the only holiday that from early rabbinic days was observed as 2 days, but referred to as Yoma Arichta - One Long Day. Unlike Passover or Sukkot, which some people observe as 7 or 8 days, sometimes eliminating the 2nd day at the end of the holiday (as we do here), Rosh Hashanah has pretty much always been 2 days.
I think the wisdom here lies in the challenge of actually opening the heart, which is the first step in interrupting behavior, healing relationships, offering forgiveness. We need to prioritize significant time to what otherwise in a capitalist society might be considered “unproductive.”
We need time to pause. And pausing takes time.
This desire to pause is powerful enough to encourage most of us to take at least 1 day off from work this week, if not two! We step out of our routines and participate in this urban pilgrimage to the well of renewal.
Secondly, as culture critic and iconoclast Jay Michaelson pointed out in his recent op-ed in The Forward, entitled, “Why you shouldn’t go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah this year!” “Rosh Hashanah is a series of mixed messages. The day itself is confused, an amalgam of celebration and repentance, conviviality and sobriety.
Are we supposed to celebrate the Birthday of the World or get busy with apologizing to God?” he asks.
To which I answer, Yes, that is precisely its power. This is the wisdom of Jewish tradition. Celebrations in our life cycle and in our year cycle contain within them the very contradictions and conflicting emotions that we humans experience. They reflect back to us our own complexity and the necessity to hold joy and loss; the simultaneous need for healing and celebration.
In fact, they teach us how to do so.
This is the breaking of the glass at a wedding.
This is Mourner’s Kaddish at a Bat Mitzvah.
This is removing the 10 drops of wine from our cups at the Passover seder.
This is collective mourning during the Hebrew month of Av followed immediately by the love story of the month of Elul.
We are ourselves confused amalgams of celebration and repentance, grief and hope.
It is by design that we find ourselves dipping apples in honey and beating our chests with a gentle fist.
For some this is the year your mother passed away and your child was born.
This is the year you got sober and lost your best friends.
This is the year that 300 tribes gathered in prayer and protest in Standing Rock to protect water as sacred, and the year that in Flint, MI toxic water has resulted in disease, displacement and death.
This is the year you lived into one dream and let go of another.
And it all culminates on Yom Kippur when “We are invited to exist in a liminal space, neither alive nor dead, and to do the hard work of looking inward.” And we are holier for it.
It is only when we can hold this emotional complexity, that we are able to confront our ultimate vulnerability, our mortality - to truly open our hearts to the magic and heartbreak of being alive.
This is why we are really here. To participate in the renewal of the cosmos and of ourselves. And this leads us to the third truth of Rosh Hashanah, the true medicine of this season. Teshuva.
Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto wrote, “The time for teshuvah is Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of the creation of the world. This is because teshuvah...is also a kind of creativity.” We return to who we are meant to be, but have not yet become. We return to growth and possibility that has lain dormant within us. That is why the process of Teshuva, as painful and vulnerable as it can be, is in fact very joyous and hopeful.” [3] We sing, Hashiveinu Adonai Elecha - Praying that we may return to our source, ourselves. And then we sing, Hadesh Yameinu - Renew our days. Return and renewal, are steps in the same dance.
The poet Marge Piercy writes,
“Forgive the dead year. Forgive yourself.
What will be wants to push through your fingers.
The light you seek hides in your belly.
The light you crave longs to stream from your eyes.
You are the moon that will wax in new goodness.” [4]
Rosh Hashanah is the welcome houseguest, invited to remind us that every year, every day, in each and every one of us, creation is renewed.
Hayom Harat Olam - Today the world is conceived anew. Today is pregnant with possibility. We are returning to who were are meant to be, but have not yet become. For us as individuals and as a community. The projects of becoming who you were meant to be and building this sacred community are deeply creative tasks; where your skills, passions, aspirations and longings are both the stone and the chisel.
While we sing Avinu Malkeinu, Our Father, Our King and immerse ourselves in ancient images of coronation, we must simultaneously deconstruct the hierarchal liturgy and place ourselves in direct relationship with that which governs our lives, our sovereignty, our souls. Be it our breadth or our ancestors or our connection to nature. This holiday is a time to deepen our relationships with one another and ask questions about the fragility of life; questions about Vulnerability and Responsibility and Community.
Rosh Hashanah is a tonic that cleanses us of all the distractions that keep us distant from that which is most important to us.
The anxiety that keep us from kindness and gratitude. The exhaustion that keeps us from awe. The fear that keeps us from connection.
This is the moment to find your center, to close your eyes and connect to your breath. And ask yourself, what are my personal, political and spiritual commitments this year? Where do I want to focus my attention? What do I want to let go of?
As we embark on the year 5777, I invite you to join me in the journey through Jewish time; To discover what transformative power this season holds for you.
Together we can uncover the invisible powers, the healing potential, the wisdom woven into the fabric of each month and holiday.
When God commands Abraham - Lech Lecha - Go, leave your land, the place of your birth, your father’s house, el ha’aretz asher areka. to the place that will be revealed at some future time --
Abraham gathers all his belongings and his family, and hits the road.
Why, we must ask, does God offer so much specificity about the starting point, and so little information about the destination?
One midrash explains, that when Abraham, and by extension all of us, begin a journey without a destination, we have the capacity to be made new. [5] Lech, says God - Go! But that’s not all. Lech Lecha - that final repetition, best translates as “to yourself.” In the words of the Zohar - “Travel in in order to transform yourself, create yourself anew.” Lekh lekha: Travel - to yourself. Not to the present, resident self--but to the self of aspiration, the perhaps unimagined self. [6]
May this journey we are beginning tonight, without clear end or destination, be it be a gift you give yourself.
May find the courage to leave behind that which is no longer serving you, to immerse yourself in the process of Teshuvah, and open yourself to the possibility of transformation.
May it be the beginning of many opportunities to dip into the wisdom of Jewish time together at Kol Tzedek.
And May we all go from strength to strength.
[1] Lew, Alan. This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, p. 7.
[2] Ibid, p. 9.
[3] Machzor Lev Shalem, p. 157.
[4] Piercy, Marge. "Head of the Year" from The Art of Blessing the Day, p. 148.
[5] Midrash Tanhuma, Parashat Lech Lecha:3.
[6] Zornberg, Avivah. The Murmuring Deep, p. 139.
October 2, 2016
There was a time when I thought I might be done with Judaism and commit my life to Buddhist meditation.
For anyone who has ever sat a silent meditation retreat, not much happens activity wise. The schedule of the day is an uninteresting combination of sitting meditation and walking meditation - maybe a few minutes to speak with a teacher in a formal interview. Sleeping and eating punctuate an otherwise uneventful day. And yet, so much arises. The experience can be extreme - extremely joyful, extremely painful - both physically and mentally. A week can go by and nothing happens and everything happens, all at once.
The wisdom of removing all external stimulus gives us the opportunity to see clearly what of our lives is simply and purely, us.
To see ourselves more clearly. It can’t be blamed on bureaucracy or traffic. It is some combination of genetics and experience, integrated into our bones and our brains.
In the words of Rabbi Alan Lew, alav hashalom, “In the visible world, we live out our routine and sometimes messy lives. We have jobs, families, and houses. Our lives seem quite ordinary. It is only beneath the surface of this world that the real and unseen drama of our lives is unfolding…” [1] Meditation is what taught me how to pay attention to that which was beneath the surface, to journey inward.
But at some point, on some retreat, I had a moment of wakefulness, and I thought to myself, What about Shabbat?! If I became a monk, I would really miss Shabbat. And Passover. And quite frankly Yom Kippur!
I realized that the journey through the Jewish year is its own retreat, its own journey inward. Each holiday is a tincture, a salve, a well of wisdom from which to draw. It is a container for our emotions as it calls forth different parts of ourselves. Each month, with its own character, is like a bookmark on the heart, it assures us there will be space for joy and there will be time to weep.
Fear not, all of who you are can be found here, in the rhythm of Jewish time.
And, perhaps most importantly, you are not alone. We will journey together, we will take each other there.
I believe that cycle of the Jewish year is full of medicine for the ailments of being human. And each holiday brings with it a booster shot for a different spiritual practice.
The Jewish holidays are constants against which we measure time and change. Each holiday brings its own stories, emotions and rituals.
For example, Sukkot connects us to the physical world, the cycle of rain and draught, to a culture of hospitality and the bounty of the harvest. Hanukkah is about light and miracles, hope and natural resources. Purim forces us to question reality, to redefine bravery and to embody joy. On Passover we imbibe freedom, we steep ourselves in ritual and crawl out of the dark days of winter and into the possibility of spring, of redemption, of liberation. Tisha B’av is a moment of collective mourning, of sitting with loss and destruction, of outrage and release. This is but a taste of the well of Jewish time that we are called to gather around and draw from. It is where we, like our ancestors, might meet our lovers, our partners, our comrades. It replenishes our burnout, quenches our loneliness, oxygenates our souls.
And we drink from that well tonight.
Rosh Hashanah means head of the year. It marks the start of the Jewish calendar as we know it. But as it turns out, Rosh Hashanah, as we know it, is never mentioned in the Torah.
Rabbi Alan Lew explains, “In ancient Israel the seventh month of the year was an anxious time. All the other civilizations of the ancient Near East were sustained by great rivers. The Egyptians had the Nile, the Babylonians had the Tigris and the Euphrates; but Israel was completely dependent on rain. The rains came in the eighth month. So the seventh month was a time when the nation of Israel felt its life hanging in the balance. This utter dependence on the heavens seems to have given the ancient Israelites an intense sense of their dependence on God. It may very well have been this dependence that sensitized the Israelites to the existence of God in the first place. They felt themselves to be part of a vast interpenetrating whole, a cosmos in which the weather and their own moral condition were active and interdependent constituents. The round of holidays we now call the Days of Awe gave form to this sense.” [2]
What we now call Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish “new year” is only mentioned in the Torah as Yom HaZikaron - a day of remembrance, and Yom Zikaron Truah, the day the great horn of remembrance is sounded, observed 10 days before Yom Kippur.
But what were we meant to remember?
And why this great sound?
As if to awaken us from our slumber, like the existential alarm clock, calling us back to ourselves, our purpose. Sure, it is an opportunity to renew your membership, donate to just causes, and reconnect to community after the irregularity of summer,
but what is the real tonic of Rosh Hashanah?
Tonight I want to explore three deep truths about Rosh Hashanah.
First, Rosh Hashanah is our reset button. a new beginning. In the age of snapchat and instagram, where emails arrive every second by the dozen, pausing is a sacred act.
The first step in interrupting a destructive or addictive behavior is becoming aware. Rosh Hashanah presents us at the very least with that long pause that makes awareness possible.
It is the only holiday that from early rabbinic days was observed as 2 days, but referred to as Yoma Arichta - One Long Day. Unlike Passover or Sukkot, which some people observe as 7 or 8 days, sometimes eliminating the 2nd day at the end of the holiday (as we do here), Rosh Hashanah has pretty much always been 2 days.
I think the wisdom here lies in the challenge of actually opening the heart, which is the first step in interrupting behavior, healing relationships, offering forgiveness. We need to prioritize significant time to what otherwise in a capitalist society might be considered “unproductive.”
We need time to pause. And pausing takes time.
This desire to pause is powerful enough to encourage most of us to take at least 1 day off from work this week, if not two! We step out of our routines and participate in this urban pilgrimage to the well of renewal.
Secondly, as culture critic and iconoclast Jay Michaelson pointed out in his recent op-ed in The Forward, entitled, “Why you shouldn’t go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah this year!” “Rosh Hashanah is a series of mixed messages. The day itself is confused, an amalgam of celebration and repentance, conviviality and sobriety.
Are we supposed to celebrate the Birthday of the World or get busy with apologizing to God?” he asks.
To which I answer, Yes, that is precisely its power. This is the wisdom of Jewish tradition. Celebrations in our life cycle and in our year cycle contain within them the very contradictions and conflicting emotions that we humans experience. They reflect back to us our own complexity and the necessity to hold joy and loss; the simultaneous need for healing and celebration.
In fact, they teach us how to do so.
This is the breaking of the glass at a wedding.
This is Mourner’s Kaddish at a Bat Mitzvah.
This is removing the 10 drops of wine from our cups at the Passover seder.
This is collective mourning during the Hebrew month of Av followed immediately by the love story of the month of Elul.
We are ourselves confused amalgams of celebration and repentance, grief and hope.
It is by design that we find ourselves dipping apples in honey and beating our chests with a gentle fist.
For some this is the year your mother passed away and your child was born.
This is the year you got sober and lost your best friends.
This is the year that 300 tribes gathered in prayer and protest in Standing Rock to protect water as sacred, and the year that in Flint, MI toxic water has resulted in disease, displacement and death.
This is the year you lived into one dream and let go of another.
And it all culminates on Yom Kippur when “We are invited to exist in a liminal space, neither alive nor dead, and to do the hard work of looking inward.” And we are holier for it.
It is only when we can hold this emotional complexity, that we are able to confront our ultimate vulnerability, our mortality - to truly open our hearts to the magic and heartbreak of being alive.
This is why we are really here. To participate in the renewal of the cosmos and of ourselves. And this leads us to the third truth of Rosh Hashanah, the true medicine of this season. Teshuva.
Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto wrote, “The time for teshuvah is Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of the creation of the world. This is because teshuvah...is also a kind of creativity.” We return to who we are meant to be, but have not yet become. We return to growth and possibility that has lain dormant within us. That is why the process of Teshuva, as painful and vulnerable as it can be, is in fact very joyous and hopeful.” [3] We sing, Hashiveinu Adonai Elecha - Praying that we may return to our source, ourselves. And then we sing, Hadesh Yameinu - Renew our days. Return and renewal, are steps in the same dance.
The poet Marge Piercy writes,
“Forgive the dead year. Forgive yourself.
What will be wants to push through your fingers.
The light you seek hides in your belly.
The light you crave longs to stream from your eyes.
You are the moon that will wax in new goodness.” [4]
Rosh Hashanah is the welcome houseguest, invited to remind us that every year, every day, in each and every one of us, creation is renewed.
Hayom Harat Olam - Today the world is conceived anew. Today is pregnant with possibility. We are returning to who were are meant to be, but have not yet become. For us as individuals and as a community. The projects of becoming who you were meant to be and building this sacred community are deeply creative tasks; where your skills, passions, aspirations and longings are both the stone and the chisel.
While we sing Avinu Malkeinu, Our Father, Our King and immerse ourselves in ancient images of coronation, we must simultaneously deconstruct the hierarchal liturgy and place ourselves in direct relationship with that which governs our lives, our sovereignty, our souls. Be it our breadth or our ancestors or our connection to nature. This holiday is a time to deepen our relationships with one another and ask questions about the fragility of life; questions about Vulnerability and Responsibility and Community.
Rosh Hashanah is a tonic that cleanses us of all the distractions that keep us distant from that which is most important to us.
The anxiety that keep us from kindness and gratitude. The exhaustion that keeps us from awe. The fear that keeps us from connection.
This is the moment to find your center, to close your eyes and connect to your breath. And ask yourself, what are my personal, political and spiritual commitments this year? Where do I want to focus my attention? What do I want to let go of?
As we embark on the year 5777, I invite you to join me in the journey through Jewish time; To discover what transformative power this season holds for you.
Together we can uncover the invisible powers, the healing potential, the wisdom woven into the fabric of each month and holiday.
When God commands Abraham - Lech Lecha - Go, leave your land, the place of your birth, your father’s house, el ha’aretz asher areka. to the place that will be revealed at some future time --
Abraham gathers all his belongings and his family, and hits the road.
Why, we must ask, does God offer so much specificity about the starting point, and so little information about the destination?
One midrash explains, that when Abraham, and by extension all of us, begin a journey without a destination, we have the capacity to be made new. [5] Lech, says God - Go! But that’s not all. Lech Lecha - that final repetition, best translates as “to yourself.” In the words of the Zohar - “Travel in in order to transform yourself, create yourself anew.” Lekh lekha: Travel - to yourself. Not to the present, resident self--but to the self of aspiration, the perhaps unimagined self. [6]
May this journey we are beginning tonight, without clear end or destination, be it be a gift you give yourself.
May find the courage to leave behind that which is no longer serving you, to immerse yourself in the process of Teshuvah, and open yourself to the possibility of transformation.
May it be the beginning of many opportunities to dip into the wisdom of Jewish time together at Kol Tzedek.
And May we all go from strength to strength.
[1] Lew, Alan. This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, p. 7.
[2] Ibid, p. 9.
[3] Machzor Lev Shalem, p. 157.
[4] Piercy, Marge. "Head of the Year" from The Art of Blessing the Day, p. 148.
[5] Midrash Tanhuma, Parashat Lech Lecha:3.
[6] Zornberg, Avivah. The Murmuring Deep, p. 139.